Thank you, light-hearted B-plot, for saving us this week.
So, this was a weird episode. When we rolled Secrets and Lies, I remembered it from when I watched the first 5 minutes a few months ago, and thought it would be a fun and light-hearted ep with relatively little drama. We were surprised to find out that it is actually very heavy, particularly given current events happening around us right now. The main plot is Andie, post Pacey-breakup, has been hanging out with a bad dude. A bad rich dude. A bad rich entitled dude who likes beer, and going to parties with other rich dudes. Starting to sound familiar? So Andie calls Pacey telling him that she has been taken advantage of, and Pacey and Joey go on a crusade to punish her assaulter. The worst part is… she may have been making it up. The show leaves it ambiguous, which is…. just great. So yeah, we watch all that, much of it in awkward silence. Thankfully, the b-plot with Jen and Henry is really quite sweet. We also have reviews and voicemails at the end if you just feel like fast forwarding. We won’t fault you.
Theme by Sound of Days.
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1) The really cheap plot-device that the writers did in this ep was to erase Andie’s main emotional support: the ep acts as though her brother Jack simply doesn’t exist and never existed. On first watch, I half expected the next ep to deal with Jack’s beat-down of Rob. But we never get Jack’s response to this, do we?
1b) To write Pacey as the white knight, they had to pretend that Jack doesn’t exist.
2) Some hard-core Joey fans talk about this as the ep where Andie invents a story about assault just as a way of coming between J & P — Which creeps me the F out – and makes me think that the writers want to make sure that woman-woman friendships on the show cannot exist. Rob has been clearly established as a total creep; there is no reason for anyone – especially Joey — to disbelieve Andie. It should have been an ep about solidarity – instead we got the opposite.
3) It was pretty common at the time on US TV to have stories about sexual assault and gay bashing always end up being ‘inventions’ to gain sympathy (Veronica Mars was especially shitty on portraying homophobic attacks as something gay people invented… sheesh…)
4) So maybe we should take solace in the fact that we have advanced somewhat (not enough, but somewhat).
5) Or just recognize this ep as being extremely problematic, and nastily misogynistic.